Danny O'Brien

Danny O'Brien

International Director

Danny O'Brien has been an activist for online free speech and privacy for over 20 years. In his home country of the UK, he fought against repressive anti-encryption law, and helped make the UK Parliament more transparent with FaxYourMP. He was EFF's activist from 2005 to 2007, and its international outreach coordinator from 2007-2009. After three years working to protect at-risk online reporters with the Committee to Protect Journalists, he returned to EFF in 2013 to supervise EFF's global strategy. He is also the co-founder of the Open Rights Group, Britain's own digital civil liberties organization.

In a previous life, Danny wrote and performed the only one-man show about Usenet to have a successful run in London's West End. His geek gossip zine, Need To Know, won a special commendation for services to newsgathering at the first Interactive BAFTAs. He also coined the term "life hack."

It has been over a decade since he was first commissioned to write a book on combating procrastination.

Deeplinks Posts by Danny

Last month, 360 cyber crime experts from 95 countries gathered in Strasbourg to attend the Octopus Conference. The event sounds like something from James Bond, and when you look at the attendee list—which includes senior figures from the United States Department of Justice, national police forces across the...

Social media has a competition problem, and its name is Facebook. Today, Facebook and its subsidiaries are over ten times more valuable than the next two largest social media companies outside China—Twitter and Snapchat—combined. It has cemented its dominance by buying out potential competitors before they’ve had a chance to...

Against all the odds, but with the support of nearly a million Europeans, MEPs voted earlier this month to reject the EU's proposed copyright reform—including controversial proposals to create a new "snippet" right for news publishers, and mandatory copyright filters for sites that published user uploaded content. The...

As we reported last week, JURI, the key European Parliamentary committee working on copyright reform, voted on June 20th to support compulsory copyright filters for media platforms (Article 13), and to create a new requirement on websites to obtain a license before linking to news stories (...

The power of the Internet historically arose from its edges: innovation, growth, and freedom came from its users and their contributions, rather than from some centrally controlled core of overseers. But today, for an increasing number of users, there is a powerful center to the net—and a potentially uncompetitive and...

Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Dozens of Other Computing Experts Oppose Article 13 As Europe's latest copyright proposal heads to a critical vote on June 20-21, more than 70 Internet and computing luminaries have spoken out against a dangerous provision, Article 13, that would require Internet platforms to automatically...

UPDATE: For more up-to-date information, please see EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guides. Previously, EFF recommended to PGP users that, because of new attacks revealed by researchers from Münster University of Applied Sciences, Ruhr University Bochum, and NXP Semiconductors, they should disable the PGP plugins in their email clients for...

UPDATE: For more up-to-date information, please see EFF's Surveillance Self-Defense guides.UPDATE (5/14/18): More information has been released. See EFF's more detailed explanation and analysis here. A group of European security researchers have released a warning about a set of vulnerabilities affecting users of PGP and S/MIME...

Anyone looking at their inbox in the last few months might think that the Internet companies have collectively returned from a term-of-service writers' retreat. Company after company seem to have simultaneously decided that your privacy is tremendously important to them, and collectively beg you take a look at their updated...